Increasing the predictive power of galaxy formation simulations

GIZMO

A recent paper by Phil Hopkins introduces GIZMO, a flexible magneto-hydrodynamics+gravity code. GIZMO is derived from Gadget-3, with substantial improvements to the gravity and hydrodynamics solvers, and is now the workhorse of the FIRE project. In addition to P-SPH, GIZMO implements new meshless methods, meshless finite mass (MFM) and meshless finite volume (MFV).

In a series of tests, the new meshless methods are shown to be more accurate than grid-based and smooth particle hydrodynamics solvers, and to be very competitive with moving mesh algorithms. A public version of GIZMO is available to the research community.